Journal of Religion and Popular Culture

Brian Schill
University of North Dakota

Abstract

After grounding the genre’s traditional rejection of the secular world in H.R. Niebuhr’s influential heuristic of Christian “types,” this essay distances itself from both Niebuhr’s largely existential theology and adopts Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) in order to critique the “negationism” of Contemporary Christian music (CCM) and defend its late synthesis with popular culture. In essence, what follows is a theoretical, specifically dialectical, reading of CCM which moves beyond Howard and Streck’s (1999) qualitative reading to suggest that negation as a response to popular culture has not, indeed cannot, successfully accomplish a subculture’s explicit and implicit goals, and that the late pop presence of CCM is proof of negation’s “failure.” More, CCM serves as a representative case study for the theoretical conundrum that inevitably becomes any strict negationist venture.

[1] As torn-clothed, sharp-tongued punkers A Story Untold dismantle their amplifiers and cymbal stands following their brief set of punchy rock songs, a mop-haired teen requests that all white lights in the basement-cum-concert hall be dimmed in lieu of the blue-bulbed lantern his band has brought to play beneath. The five members of this new, young band, who call themselves If I Die, pace apprehensively as a mostly new crowd of midwestern teens slowly files in past the previous band’s fans, many of whom are lazily indulging in a collective smoke outside the dirty, unwrought venue. The new audience in place, a staccato drum beat begins as the If I Die lead singer speaks: “Everyone in this room tonight: release yourself. Release yourself from the crap that goes on in the world today,” he encourages the song builds. “Free yourselves tonight!” The singer’s words get louder, slowly evolving into unintelligible screams—the opening lyrics to “One World Contradiction,” the second track on the band’s self-released They Hated Me Without Reason CD single. Deafening, caustic guitars erupt and the train wreck is complete: “I won’t take this world!” growls the singer, falling. From the first chord to the last, each of the musicians flails and stomps aimlessly, pounding on broken instruments and crashing, obliviously, into each other and the audience, which grows more energized with each collision. The rapt crowd, now a hazy, bluish silhouette, is in another place as well, moved to a world free of the pressures of school, parents, and menial jobs. Some fans shout lyrics along with the singer; others flail and dance; the rest simply watch and listen intently with the occasional bobbed head or closed eyes.

[2] The music stops abruptly and the If I Die singer thanks the crowd politely, announcing a few of the stops on his band’s forthcoming summer tour which includes a July appearance at the Cornerstone Festival. What the singer does not disclose, and is lost on the less-than-savvy listener, is that “Cornerstone,” as it is referred to simply by the more cultivated members of the audience, is an annual music event administered by Cornerstone Magazine, the “literary voice of Jesus People USA.” Beyond a mere attempt at “working the crowd,” indeed, the band’s respite makes it clear that the singer’s pre-song comments were suggestive of something more: If I Die, its name a candid reference to the children’s bedtime prayer containing the same phrase, is a Christian rock band whose emphatic refusal of the world is but the latest in a long history of “negationist” words and deeds by musical acts who consider themselves part of the American Contemporary Christian music (CCM) subculture.[1]

[3] A theory of such a negation was initially offered by nineteenth century German philosopher, historian, and theologian G.W.F. Hegel, whose dialectical method (often referred to as dialectical or historical materialism) canonized the opposition of self and other. In the Hegelian system, any concept or theoretical position known as the thesis (affirmation) is proven inadequate and thus rejected by an antithesis (negation). But as negation too is shown to be one-sided and imperfect, it must too be abandoned, resulting in the “negation of the negation” or synthesis of the two opposing concepts. This synthesis simultaneously serves as the new thesis for some future negation, and the dialectical process may continue ad infinitum or terminate depending on the context of the particular dialectical movement in question.

[4] In his earliest major work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel applies the dialectical method to the development of consciousness, outlining the historical, evolutionary journey of the individual mind from relative unconsciousness to Absolute Knowledge, or the knowledge of Spirit. Relatedly, over the course of Phenomenology’s three sections—Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Reason—Hegel articulates “the progressive unfolding of truth,” the coming to consciousness of Spirit itself, which is revealed throughout the course of history.[2] For Hegel, that is, this blossoming of Spirit, which can only occur through a series of “determinate negations,” parallels mind’s recognition of itself.

[5] In sketching the unfolding of Self-Spirit, Hegel proposes several sequential levels of consciousness, including but not limited to: sense certainty, understanding (these fall under the heading “Consciousness”), self-consciousness proper, Stoicism, Skepticism, Unhappy Consciousness, and Absolute Knowledge. Hegel begins “Self-Consciousness,” the antithesis or negation stage of the three core parts of Phenomenology, by positing that once consciousness becomes self aware it cannot exist in isolation; it demands an external object or “Other” from which to differentiate itself. Once this Other is determined, consciousness desires to assert itself through the possession, transformation, and even abolition, of the Other. In fact, to exist in a state of self-consciousness is to experience a sort of interminable desire to alter the object external to the self, to make the foreign Other less foreign, to possess, control, and know it fully. Paradoxically, since the Other gives rise to the self’s understanding of itself, self-consciousness maintains a negative, dependent relationship with this external Other. And because self-certainty is bound to the external object/Other, self-consciousness can neither supersede nor possess the object genuinely. Realization of this paradox reproduces desire and self-consciousness remains dissatisfied.

[6] In order for self-consciousness to satisfy its desire then, Hegel says that it must negate itself, meaning the Other must too present itself as self-consciousness. Thus the Other, Hegel explains, is best understood as another negative self-consciousness which also desires the transformation of the opposing self-consciousness.[3] The philosopher illustrates this opposition of self-consciousnesses through his infamous “Lordship and Bondage” (master-slave) dialectic where the two self-consciousnesses, seeking recognition from the Other and proof that they are not bound to the material world, are said to engage in a life-or-death struggle both to dominate and alter the other self-consciousness. In the midst of battle, however, both self-consciousnesses realize that the death of the Other would obliterate the recognition each seeks; thus, the battle ends with the would-be victor sparing, but controlling, the life of the Other. The result of this is an unequal situation where the victor is independent (existing only for itself) and the loser is dependent (existing for the Other). The former is the lord; the latter is the bondsman.[4]

[7] While they have likely not read such dense and at times almost incoherent psycho-theology, such is the situation in which bands like If I Die find themselves: slaves opposed to the dominant culture that has simultaneously “rejected” them. It is widely recognized, in other words, that aside from such bands’ aesthetic dismissal of secular culture (through lyrics and album art for example), as an industry CCM operates, in full, under a negative banner with respect to popular culture: CCM maintains its own radio stations, playing exclusively Christian music to predominantly Christian listeners; operates its own record labels (although many major secular labels retain Christian subsidiaries or contract with Christian labels for distribution); and even celebrates the “best” of Christian music with its alternate version of the Grammys, annually presenting “Dove” awards for standout Christian musicians, albums, producers, and even videos. What follows, then, is a Hegelian reading of CCM that frames the bulk of the genre as a negation of the American culture it desires to possess, transform, and even abolish; CCM is the abstract “slave” consciousness to secular culture’s “master,” which presents itself to the Christian rock self-consciousness as the independent master—popular culture is dominant or sovereign, and, as a result, principally not Christian, selfless, charitable, and so on. The impetus behind this negation of the Other is the Christian’s desire for culture that speaks to and for them, a desire not only to renounce the non-Christian world but to advocate actively for something scarcely found—if not repressed or shunned outright by the master—in the dominant culture: a sense of Spirit and morality in general, and a Christian ethic in particular.

[8] But to the likely chagrin of many who consider themselves part of CCM subculture, this essay, after providing a brief history of Christian negationism and scrutinizing the lyrics, performance, album art, and even commercial behaviour of two enduring and exemplary Christian rock acts, challenges the genre’s negationist tradition and actually defends not only such “cross-over” (no pun intended) Christian artists as Amy Grant, Stryper, Switchfoot, Relient K, and DC Talk, but the genre’s increasing ubiquity in popular media as not only predictable and necessary, but representative of the failures of negationism more broadly. Specifically, and in keeping with Hegelian tradition, a pure negation of culture is both ineffectual and impossible. This problem affects more than the adherents of CCM, however, as all negationist subcultures that frame themselves as desperately seeking independence from the cultural dominant are plagued by negation’s difficulties. Given negation’s frailty, however, the refusal of one’s parent culture is valuable in that it supplies both individuals and subcultural groups with a lexicon and forum for cultural and self-criticism, which, ironically, becomes useful only once negation itself is abandoned and the parent culture reconsidered. Negation thus remains indispensable.

Love Not The World

[9] As has been exhaustively documented elsewhere, negationism by Christians is nothing new; in fact, one might argue that the Christian religion was born out of negation: Christ challenged mainstream Jewish and Roman cultures of his era, passing time with not the cultural and religious elite, but sinners, the infirm, and those otherwise marginalized. Different versions of this negation of the social, cultural, and religious establishment were furthered by various early Christian sects and canonized, theologically speaking, by some of the religion’s early apologists, specifically Clement of Rome and, to a lesser extent, Origen.[5] Updating these theologians for a post-Hegelian society, and developing an historical typology of the varied Christian response to culture (which quickly evolved beyond a strict negationist stance), is theologian H.R. Niebuhr who in Christ and Culture (1951) acknowledges that the debate over the appropriate ethical Christian response to culture is ongoing and will remain on the table long after his own lifetime. Indeed, George W. Bush, American President and born-again evangelical, publicly acknowledged his faith’s traditional and continuing struggle as recently as 2004: “All of us—parents and schools and government—must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture, and to send the right messages to our children.”[6] But why are Christ and culture so often seen as binary opposites? Niebuhr submits three explanations. First, and perhaps most obviously, Christ advocated the renunciation of this world in favour of another—the Kingdom of God. In so doing he simultaneously (second) challenged any human achievement as irrelevant in the context of God’s grace. Finally, and not at all flippantly, Niebuhr suggests that Christianity and non-Christian culture see each other as a threat quite simply because both are often intolerant (7).[7]

[10] Admitting the inadequacy of his definitions, Niebuhr begins his polemic by defining both Christ and culture, suggesting that the terms will forever be in dialogue. The ever-evolving Christian response to this dialogue is represented by three suspiciously Hegelian ethical types, the dialectical development of which constitutes the remainder of Niebuhr’s volume: the Christ against culture type, those who feel that Christ “confronts men with the challenge of an ‘either-or’ decision” (40); Christ of culture, a more accommodating position opposed to the separational group wherein believers see no tension between Christ and the world into which he willingly came, and interpret culture through Christ and vise versa; and Christ above culture, the majority type which refuses the bifurcation, often answering the Christ and culture question by affirming both in different contexts.[8] Due to its relation to cultural negation, this paper tackles only Niebuhr’s first category—that of the “radical” Christians who consider Christ “anticultural” and live their lives in accord with this opposition.[9]

[11] According to Niebuhr, the Christ against culture position was, logically, the attitude of the earliest Christians and remains a “more consistent” (although admittedly not majority today) position than any of the others he later outlines. Second and third century examples of Christian sects founded on this notion of complete separation include the Essenes, Marcionites, Manichaeans, Montanists, various gnostics, and other “millenarians and mystics.”[10] For these believers, the physical world is “evil,” and will be forever so, in that it is alienated from God; thus, the affirmation of Christ cannot coincide with an affirmation of the world: “This succinct statement of the positive meaning of Christianity is ... accompanied by an equally emphatic negation,” Niebuhr writes. “The counterpart of loyalty to Christ … is the rejection of cultural society; a clear line of separation is drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world.”[11] In addition to the writing of Tertullian, Niebuhr cites several Biblical texts as initiating this attitude, including the Gospel of Matthew, Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, and Revelation. Niebuhr’s most direct scriptural evidence, however, is the first letter of John which warns:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and the desire for it are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever. (I John 2:15-17, Oxford Revised English Bible)

But while separation may have been the dominant Christian ideology in the early centuries, this position quickly became the minority following Constantine’s early fourth century adoption of Christianity as Roman state religion. Nevertheless, uneasy with their faith’s continued elevation in culture, several Christian groups over the centuries have opted to remain separate from the dominant culture, taking their faith with them;[12] for its part, CCM largely remains such a group, as Mark Allan Powell admits in the introduction to his Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, admitting that CCM as a whole exists in a “parallel universe.”[13]

[12] Although a full history of CCM is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be stressed that Christian rock has existed for over four decades: as early as 1967 the Electric Prunes, a psychedelic Los Angeles rock group, recorded Mass in F Minor, their rock version of a Roman Catholic Mass (sung entirely in Latin).[14] Shortly thereafter (April 1968), the Bay Area band People! covered the Zombies’ “I Love You (But The Words Won’t Come)” which was released as a single on Capitol Records. People!’s frontman was a little-known born-again Christian songwriter named Larry Norman. “I Love You,” soon the fourteenth most requested song in the country, was to be included on the band’s forthcoming debut album, tentatively entitled by Norman We Need A Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock and Roll. Fearing the non-salability of Jesus, Capitol summarily intervened and released the album simply as I Love You. In protest, the story goes, Norman left the band the day the album was released and immediately began a more ministerial, and less commercially successful, solo career.[15]

[13] While not the first rock musician to take Jesus seriously in his music, Norman is today considered the “Father of Christian Rock” by many Christian musicians, industry personnel, and fans. Born into a religious Texas family in 1947, Norman actually spent his young adult years in Southern California. By his twentieth birthday he had taken an active role in a nascent “Jesus movement,” a nondenominational grass roots Christian revival movement consisting mostly of young people, especially former hippies, whose “One Way” logo was the crudely drawn silhouette of a hand with its index finger pointed upward.

[14] The Jesus movement was comprised of “Jesus People” or “Jesus Freaks” who were often, in the words of Randall Balmer, erstwhile hippies who had become “totally disillusioned with the counterculture revolution, the ‘peace,’ ‘love,’ ‘flower power’ movement, LSD, and so forth.”[16] Characteristics of the Jesus movement included a very in-your-face style of evangelism, the belief that one must be born-again and accept Jesus Christ as a personal saviour to avoid spending eternity in hell, a heavy apocalyptic/millenarian tone or the expectation that the End Times were near, and criticism of both mainstream American consumer culture and the so-called counterculture they deemed ineffectual, amoral, and hardly “counter” the rest of secular culture.

[15] After fermenting in the underground for a few years, the Jesus movement climaxed around 1971 as part of what has been described by William McLoughlin and Robert Fogel as a broader American religious revival, when it was discovered by the mainstream media and covered everywhere from Time and Newsweek to Rolling Stone and multiple television news magazines.[17] Nineteen seventy-one also saw the off-Broadway theatrical release of two Jesus-themed “rock operas,” Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar, which dramatized the Jesus story for theatre audiences through rock music (both became motion pictures in 1973).[18] But as the counterculture waned, so did the Jesus movement; by 1975 the Jesus movement had again returned underground only to be kept alive by an ever dwindling, yet zealous, number of chapters scattered throughout the nation, many of which remain to this day in various forms.

[16] Its greater demise notwithstanding, in less than a decade the Jesus movement had more than caught the attention of the mainstream American culture to which it was opposed. And as sociologist Robert Ellwood observes, the supreme and enduring legacy of the Jesus movement is its music: “[T]he great vehicle of the Jesus movement is music. It is largely music that has made the movement a part of pop culture, and it is the Jesus movement as pop culture that distinguishes it from what is going on in the churches.”[19]

[16] But how do we define Christian rock and roll specifically? Certainly the Christian rock that began with the Jesus movement is a disparate movement that can be read dialectically, as we shall see. But what characterizes a rock song or artist as “Christian”? Since they came from strong religious backgrounds, are Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis (who is related to Jimmy Swaggart) Christian rock? Perhaps the most telling feature of Christian rock that has remained from its origins to today is the emphasis it places on pious lyrics; that is, as an industry CCM is the only popular music genre that looks exclusively to the lyrical content of its artists for classification. Indeed, in terms of sound there is Christian punk, pop, country, hard rock, and metal; the unifying factor in each of these dissimilar styles, the component that makes them CCM generically, is their lyrical focus: Christ. Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate for it suggests that any rock song to discuss Jesus in an earnest way is Christian rock, which is of course untrue. In fact, Jesus seems to have been a popular subject in rock lyrics throughout the late-sixties and early-seventies; in addition to country/western’s default piety and the transparent Peter, Paul, and Mary, countless other rock acts made unaffected references to Christ/God in their songs from this era, including Elton John, Neil Diamond, the Doobie Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, George Harrison, Norman Greenbaum, and Vanilla Fudge.[20] For the purposes of this essay a more specific definition is required.

[17] For that definition we turn, in part, to Jay Howard and John Streck’s critical (if largely sympathetic) analysis of the Christian music industry, Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music (1999), which treats CCM as an ideologically diverse genre home to several different “sects” that have developed and evolved dialectically in response to each other and a dynamic secular culture. Defining Christian music primarily in terms of community, Howard and Streck argue that in general:

Christian Contemporary music is an artistic product that emerges from a nexus of continually negotiated relationships binding certain artists, certain corporations, certain audiences, and certain ideas to one another. It is the art produced by an art world that surrounds a heterogeneous grouping of sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and sometimes unrelated discourses concerning moral values, artistic values, commercial values, social values, and religious values.[21]

As with Mark Powell’s take on CCM,[22] this is the beginning of a more coherent definition; however, it is still a bit vague. But borrowing heavily from Niebuhr, Howard and Streck later offer a useful typology of CCM—dividing Christian rock into separational, transformational, and integrational types—which provides the kernel for this writer’s more specific definition below.

[18] According to Howard and Streck, Separational Christian musicians, the original and largest group, see the secular and the Christian as unequivocally oppositional. As a result their music acts as a form of anticultural ministry and serves three purposes: to proselytize, to praise Jesus, and to encourage existing believers. As it is contrary to their anticultural nature, mainstream success is typically far below the radar of separational bands; thus they are marketed exclusively as Christian music, predominantly in Christian bookstores, and actively eschew commercial media and secular attention (which they tend not to receive anyway). Artists falling into this group can be read as fitting into Niebuhr’s “Christ against culture” category of Christians, whose rhetorical emphasis on evangelism, exhortation, worship, and a strict refusal of the world—or negation as this writer argues—constitutes their ideological make-up.[23]

[19] Rejecting the separational approach as ineffectual and only “preaching to the choir,” later (and far fewer) Christian musicians began arguing for better cooperation with the mainstream music industry and secular culture as a whole. These integrational bands, while not explicitly evangelical rhetorically or behaviourally, give listeners all the sound and style of today’s most popular rock and roll but offer symbols, lyrics, and lifestyles that remain consistent with Christian values: a more positive, wholesome alternative to much of today’s secular music. Such cross-over artists typically see themselves as entertainers who happen to be coming from a Christian perspective and include Amy Grant, Stryper, P.O.D., and Christian punks MxPx. For these bands and their fans, commercial success and collaboration with non-Christian record labels, promoters, and radio stations is certainly no ideological contradiction. In fact, collaboration is seen as necessarily bringing the gospel to the masses and is encouraged as something to strive for in terms of creating a balance with the otherwise hedonistic world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.[24]

[20] The third dialectical step within Christian rock and roll is represented by transformational artists. This group serves as a sort of late mediator between the separational and integrational groups: separate from the world (usually “underground”), but unopposed (or perhaps simply indifferent) to commercial success should they be fortunate enough to find it through their art. Transformational musicians lack the utilitarian component of both the separational and integrational sects; that is, they are interested less in using their music for evangelical, ministerial, financial, or culture-countering purposes than in making “art for art’s sake.” Such artists simply happen to be Christian, or at least Christian-influenced, and see their art and their religion as indivisible and complementary. Their rhetoric and attitude toward the commercial side of their craft all reflect this position, and, as a result, they tend to flounder in a musical no-man’s-land. In other words, transformational Christian musicians are rarely marketed as Christian music in Christian bookstores while simultaneously tending to receive little respect from the secular industry as a result of their music’s religious content.[25]

[21] As the reader will have noticed, Howard and Streck’s tripartite categorization of Christian rock, like Niebuhr’s before them, looks strikingly Hegelian in form. Their empirical/sociological analysis, however, largely steers clear of theory and scarcely investigates theology; Hegel is mentioned not once, and Niebuhr only in passing early on—despite their debt to his heuristic. However, as very few empirical (and even fewer theoretical) analyses have been made on Christian rock music, their text proves useful here, especially as it provides a historiographic, dialectical reading of CCM which describes the initial burst of Christian rock as anticultural.

[22] “[In] this separational view,” continue Howard and Streck, “the Christian and the secular are locked in opposition—God versus the world—and accepting the one necessarily entails rejecting the other.”[26] With this in mind, then, and concentrating specifically on Howard and Streck’s “separational” Christian musicians (the original and still largest category of Christian musicians), CCM is here defined as a rock and roll genre that was established and continues to operate upon the negation of mainstream (secular) culture in aesthetic, ideological, behavioural, and commercial terms. The lyrics tend to express affinity for Christ, of course, and the the artists and their fans tend to operate as a “continually negotiated” community, to use Howard and Streck’s words; but the key to understanding Christian rock here is Hegel and negation, specifically as it is described by the philosopher in Phenomenology: the refusal of the “Other” coupled with the self’s ultimate search for Spirit. Looking to Hegel’s dialectic as a model, then, this essay—before concluding with a defense of synthesis—will now analyse and critique the negationism of two of American CCM’s most representative, popular, and persistent acts—Petra and Resurrection Band.

Petra

[23] While its global popularity, endurance, and occasional Grammy nomination might appear to cast its oppositional status in doubt, few Christian rock bands better epitomize the broad negation of culture than Fort Wayne, Indiana’s Petra. Founded in 1972 by Bob Hartman, Petra has released over 20 albums (including a live album, two hymn collections, and two Spanish-language records), most of which are immodest in their negation of culture, as the titles Not of This World (1983), Beat the System (1984), and This Means War! (1987) all imply.

[24] Originally an evangelistic outfit (apropos the Jesus movement’s evangelical advocacy in the early-1970s), early on Petra made it a point to encourage the conversion of non-believers to Christ during or after their concerts. However, Petra, whose songs are frequently covered by younger Christian rockers both live and on record, easily became one of the most recognized names in Christian rock by making a career out of negating the secular, unsaved world, which they did in myriad ways until their dissolution late in 2005. For instance, as the band sings on the cavalier, baroque title track to its 1983 record Not of this World: “We’re not welcome in this world of wrong / We are foreigners who don’t belong / We are strangers, we are aliens / We are not of this world.”[27]

[25] Realizing the ministerial potential of their music, the group abandoned evangelism and the secular music industry, to which they had ties, in favour of directing all effort toward the converted, passionately exhorting those who have already come to Christ and reminding fellow believers of the either-or reality of existence: “We know our music is aimed at the church,” the devout Hartman told one interviewer. “Our lyrics seek to edify the body of Christ, and we’re not writing songs that are ... directed to nonbelievers.”[28] Hartman here is referring to songs from his band’s 1987 album This Means War!, a record that reifies the self-versus-other “spiritual warfare” many Christians see being waged daily between the Christian and secular cultures. Accordingly, the cover art for This Means War! (which invokes in the reader Hegel’s description of the bout between master and slave) is the watercolor image of a muscular, Caucasian man reaching for the sky from his knees; he is outdoors as a thick beam of yellow light pours over him from above. In the background a row of houses and perhaps a church are set amidst an ominous, violet sky; in the foreground a golden shield, helmet, burgundy sash, and doubled-edged sword with golden hilt await retrieval.

[26] Like the Not of this World tag and the abovementioned If I Die album, the connotation here leaves the interpreter little work: no longer will the forces of Good be pushed around by the godless culture in which they (regrettably) exist.[29] This believer, the listener assumes, is on the otherworldly side of light, the side of God—which is also his source of strength. One can only guess what the “this” of This Means War! is what has resulted in the brawny Christian’s decision to forego coexistence or the turning of cheeks and instead bear arms against his enemy. In any case, here Petra invokes the coming battle between the forces of light and darkness as prophesied in scripture. Or as Howard and Streck put it, referring to not only the band’s songs and album art, but their (short-lived) decision to wear matching army fatigues in concert, “Petra’s message to Christians can perhaps be understood as a musical reading of Joshua or Revelation, the armies of God rising up to conquer evil.”[30] This bellicose theme, unsurprisingly at its peak during the late Cold War-Ronald Reagan years (and, to be fair, Petra was hardly the only Christian rock act to adopt this theme in concert and on record) [31] continued with the band’s 1988 album On Fire!, whose cover is, simply, the colourful rendering of a broadsword, again golden-hilted, bursting forth through a nebulous darkness. In the “background”—on the other side of the sword-induced rupture in the space-time continuum—an all-consuming fire envelops a pale arm to the wrist. Here, too, Petra is bold in their connotation and leaves precious little room for interpretation: the sword of the (Caucasian) Absolute has broken through the darkness, bringing with it light, force, and perhaps salvation for a deleterious world.[32]

[27] Aesthetics aside, the band’s negationism was evident in its business and personal decisions as well. Having only released its records on Christian record labels (primarily Myrrh, StarSong, and Word), [33] and even reportedly refusing offers from mainstream record labels,[34] the band took its attitude toward culture from Hartman, the band’s founder and a product of Fort Wayne’s Christian Training Academy. Following his band’s attempt at crossing over to the cultural mainstream early in its career, Hartman claims to have felt compelled by God to minister exclusively to Christians. Powell writes that after the band’s failed crossover attempt, the group “would continue to give altar calls and they encouraged fans to bring ‘unsaved friends’ to concerts, but their focus shifted from an appeal for conversion to an affirmation of Christian self-esteem.”[35] This attitude was reinforced by Hartman’s hiring of John Schlitt in 1986 to front the group following erstwhile lead singer Greg Volz’s contentious departure. The hard-living former lead singer of seventies rockers Head East (“Since You Been Gone”), Schlitt had abandoned not only the music industry in 1979, but culture and all its vices; he converted to Christianity and reportedly even stopped listening to all popular music before being approached by Hartman about Petra’s vacancy.[36]

[28] Finally, to coincide with the release of their This Means War! Album in 1987, Petra politicised its disapproval of the dominant culture by publicising its support for a series of bills making the rounds in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives that would restore the right of voluntary prayer in public schools.[37] Designed to reverse a series of Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s that “outlawed” Bible study and group prayer on public school grounds, the bills in question never made it to the congressional floor.[38] Irrespective of the bills’ success, however, Petra, and Hartman in particular, made clear their position on the non-Christian world in which they were immersed; that position remained with the band to its final days.

Resurrection Band

[29] Not long after Petra formed in Indiana, Resurrection Band (or “Rez Band”) began what they called their musical ministry in Chicago, Illinois. What makes Rez Band, whose members included wed vocalists Glenn and Wendi Kaiser, an appropriate choice for this essay is not only its aesthetic and commercial negationism, but stout affiliation with the aforementioned Jesus People USA (JPUSA), a Chicago-based, non-denominational evangelical Christian outreach community and direct descendent of the Jesus movement. Rez Band cofounders Glenn and Wendi Kaiser are actually two of the 500-member Christian commune’s elders or “deacons,” and in the group’s promotional material[39] JPUSA cite two specific texts as grounding its theology: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1937 theological treatise The Cost of Discipleship (and specifically his “cheap grace” polemic which suggests that Christianity without the costly work of discipleship and community is Christianity without Christ), and the Christian Bible’s “Acts of the Apostles,” whose second and fourth chapters describe a model Christian community.[40] Taking these documents to heart, JPUSA advocates a sort of Christian praxis, working daily to improve the lives of those living in Chicago’s poorer North Side (where the group’s commune is located) through various endeavors, including Cornerstone Community Outreach, a women’s and children’s shelter, and a neighborhood outreach organization called “Brothas and Sistas United.” In addition to formerly housing Rez Band, JPUSA’s North Side commune is also home to the aforementioned, and recently defunct, Cornerstone magazine (the editors of which still coordinate the Cornerstone Festival, CCM’s longest running concert) and Grrr Records, a not-for-profit record label which produces and distributes Rez Band material and other JPUSA bands/artists.

[30] As a result of this “practical Christianity,” Rez Band might appear less “Christ against culture,” to return to Niebuhr, than as having embraced a sprinkling of synthesis. That is to say, despite its negationism, the band rejected the validity of absolute separation and made evangelism and ministry two of its JPUSA commune’s membership requirements. Such an uncomfortable paradox is not uncommon for separational CCM acts, as Howard and Streck note: “In their fervent desire to preach the gospel ... separational artists ... are frequently the first to incorporate new cultural trends into their work in an effort to make their message ‘relevant.’”[41] Its evangelism notwithstanding, as believers in the inerrancy of the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ, Rez Band has clearly renounced the material, secular world.[42] In addition to her band’s communal lifestyle and establishment of its own record label apart from the industry, for instance, singer Wendi Kaiser too cites the second chapter of John’s first epistle as the message she wishes most to convey to fans: “My message to supporters is Live For Eternity. So often we only fill our lives with trivial things, never considering eternal principles and truths. Like St. John wrote to us, ‘Do not love the world or anything in the world.’”[43]

[31] Aesthetically, the band left no clearer example of its refusal of the world than its album Live Bootleg. A large black leather motorcycle boot, graphically rendered, replete with studs and buckles and perhaps a steel toe, graces the cover of this record, the band’s first official live album (recorded over the course of two days at the Odeum Theater in Chicago in 1983). Trailing away from the boot are several curved, colourful lines suggesting that the foot to whom the boot belongs is being swung with speed and force; surrounding the boot are several jagged red and orange spikes—illustrator argot connoting “contact” with an object. “Ladies and gentlemen: please give a warm welcome to Chicago’s own Resurrection Band!” shouts an emcee at the beginning of the record.[44] Audience cheers give way to the introductory guitar riff of “Military Man,” the band’s tone-setting opening song and ambiguously utopian prophecy that the Second Coming of Christ will result in the end of all war and wrongdoing. “Military man got his demons laughing,” yelps Glenn Kaiser, “Pushing him over the sanity brink / Horizons changing, train derailing / His iron ship’s begun to sink / For this is the end of the military man.”[45]

[32] What is clear barely a minute into the record is that Kaiser, the song’s author, foresees not only the Second Coming, but in it the imminent end of the “military man”—also likely a reference to Cold War-era brinksmanship. The eschatological nature of the song already speaks volumes about the band’s theology: millenarian, evangelical, anticultural, and biblically based. But what is unclear in the song is whether the military man’s “end” has been brought about by his own actions or those of Christ: “[He] Saw the light from the man above / His heart pierced by a sword of love.” But did the military man (a euphemism, perhaps, for the unsaved) convert, suffer a nuclear assault, or was he, the hapless representative of all petty corporeal armies, killed by the Absolute General, the resurrected Lord? A sword of love is still a sword, after all. “He caught sight of the future shock / Defenses crushed beneath the Risen Rock,” Kaiser continues as the song adopts a more assertive tone, becoming a sort of postmodern, heavy metal “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—the resurrected Lord expressing the grapes of wrath and drowning soldiers blue and gray alike with a world-purging juice. Indeed, the squealing Kaiser eventually makes such a vintner’s reference himself: “No more doing time / He tasted the new wine ... No more military man.” Thus the significance of the album cover’s plied boot becomes clearer: this premillennial rock group waits expectantly for the Lord. And when he comes, the band feels, he shall do so with the swiftness and force of one thousand studded feet, knocking the wind out of all armies—out of the entire secular world—as would a swift kick to the abdomen. His Truth is marching on.[46]

[33] The lead song ends as the band segues into their next track, “Gameroom,” and the record/performance seems to go along in a similar negationist vein: aggressive, critical of culture (e.g., disparaging video games, television, and homosexuality), but curiously hopeful.[47] That is, the band is not hopeful for humanity of its own accord, but hopeful that Christ will soon return to correct a defective world. Giving the crowd an opportunity for reflection, “Gameroom” is followed by track entitled “Wendi’s Rap,” a spoken word piece. “I remember a time about twelve years ago,” Glenn’s spouse begins with what becomes her recollection of a past life of sexual impropriety and drug use. “I started to wonder what I was going to do with my life ... I wondered if there was such a thing called love,” she relates, her voice trembling. Then Wendi recalls her discovery of love in its truest form: “No matter what I’d done,” Wendi concludes referring to her conversion, “I learned that you could be pure again and be new.” And although Wendi never makes a single explicit reference to Christ or even religion, the context in which her words are delivered (never mind her backing band’s music) belie her vague diction: one can be saved from the world through Christ.[48]

[34] Whereas Wendi is subtle regarding the necessity of refusing material culture in order to experience salvation, however, Glenn puts it more emphatically at the end of the performance in his own “rap,” at one point also referring specifically to the antimaterialism of John’s first letter:

[W]hat about people in the gay scene? What about dope and sex and rock and roll? There are a lot of people in hell tonight because of these things. [...] Some of you don’t know [eternal life] because you’re not sure that you know God. Others of you have said “yes” but you’ve lived “no.” One foot in the Lord; one foot in the world. You’re the prodigal son, the double-minded man, and you need to ask forgiveness and shake yourself loose from your sins and come up and ask forgiveness tonight and pray.[49]

Such calls for the audience to ask forgiveness for their sins—to “shake themselves loose”—and accept Christ on the spot are the hallmark of separational Christian rock performances; again, Petra and countless others have done, and continue to do, the same. The reader will at this point note that there is an unmistakable sense of gnosticism, broadly speaking, not in only Petra’s and Resurrection Band’s aesthetic, but much of separational CCM and evangelical Christianity: cosmological dualism (light versus darkness), humankind’s alienation from God, the world as inherently evil, and Christ as the lone bringer of light/knowledge. A further reading of this “late gnosticism,” a notion that informed much of Hegel’s enlightenment philosophy, is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper. But gnostic or not, with Hegel as our guide, it soon becomes clear that a hasty conversion and firm refusal of the world can be nothing in the end but unfulfilling both for the individual Christian self-consciousness and the entire CCM community.

The Impossibility of Negation

[35] Recalling Hegel’s description of the theoretical bout between master and slave, having won the contest, the lord (popular culture) is loosed of his desire to control the Other (the negationist). Unfortunately, as the Other is now a dependent being, the lord no longer receives recognition from this Other (rather, recognition is received but is, in a sense, coerced). The lord is also relieved of his desire to “work” on the material world and feels worthless. The bondsman, on the other hand, being dependent on the lord, too receives no genuine recognition; and, as the losing combatant, he retains his deep desire to change the Other. But in contrast to the lord, the bondsman is able to work on the external world through his labor and keep his desire at bay.

[36] Naturally, Hegel’s theory here presents certain difficulties (e.g., its absolutism and self-referential nature), the full treatment of which is beyond the scope of this paper; and the reader is free to dismiss his theology in its entirety as many already have—most notably the bulk of existentialist thinkers such as Kierkegaard (himself a Christian), Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.[50] The point that must be stressed, however, is that Hegel suggests, quite intuitively, that the above situation is unstable for both master and slave in that each self-consciousness (each of us) recognizes it retains elements of the Other, resulting in a “negative middle term” Hegel describes as an “Unhappy Consciousness.”[51] And for Hegel, the only way out of this boundless unhappiness is the mediation of Christ: the Infinite made finite, the “complete” state of being toward which all consciousnesses strive.

[37] Secular culture rejects this mediator, of course, at least in the eyes of orthodox Christians, and remains “unhappy”; its only reprieve is the negation of life itself. In other words, although the master self-consciousness, in seeking transcendence, too desires independence from the material world, it cannot escape the world apart from death. But for the Christian, the mediation of Christ is accepted with vigour as Jesus himself becomes the model for the slave self-consciousness in its enduring search for Spirit; Christ is the escape from the material world. With Christ as its guide, then, the slave recognises that s/he is already a synthesis of self and master, engaged in the world, as was Christ, but also critical of, and working within, it. Thus does the slave self-consciousness reject its slave status and become the negation of negation itself and the dialectical movement continues as self-consciousness grinds slowly toward Absolute Knowledge. This negation of negation, says Hegel, is not only desirable, but necessary for self-consciousness to achieve its goal of recognizing Self-Spirit.

[38] As we have seen, however, not all of Christendom accepts this model in practice; CCM as a whole is especially reluctant to meld with the world, as Mark Joseph and Andrew Beaujon have documented and several cross-over artists have learned (having been met with scorn by their more staunch negationist colleagues and fans).[52] For instance, following the mainstream success of her single “Baby, Baby,” which in 1991 reached the top spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart, Amy Grant (whose 1982 album Age to Age was the first gospel record to go platinum) was allegedly delivered a bouquet of flowers that read: “Turn back. You can still be saved if you renounce what you’ve done.”[53] Such criticism was not new to Grant, who in 1985 received a letter from another fan: “I’m very disappointed in you,” the fan wrote Grant for her appearance in the video for Peter Cetera’s “The Next Time I Fall.” “You looked like a sleaze.”[54] Grant’s case is only the tip of the iceberg.

[39] But in spite of pressure from the broader CCM world to remain segregated from popular culture, more openly Christian bands than ever have followed Hegel’s model, meeting the parent culture on its terms, often quite successfully, and increasing the genre’s pop ubiquity. In addition to a touring CCM-affiliated band like If I Die carousing with secular punks in the literal middle of Middle America, Christian punks MxPx spent a secular summer, so to speak, as part of the 2005 Warped Tour, an annual 30-date, multistage punk roadshow sponsored by shoe/apparel manufacturer Van’s; in 2004, ambiguously Christian punks Good Charlotte and New Found Glory teamed up with secular punks Less Than Jake and The Disasters for the cross-country “Civic Tour,” sponsored by Honda Motors and car stereo manufacturer Alpine; and countless CCM bands have found themselves high on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart of late, and, as a result, all over MTV and multiple secular music/lifestyle magazines such as Rolling Stone and Spin.[55]

[40] As far as overall record sales are concerned, CCM seems to be outpacing secular music by leaps and bounds. Lorraine Ali notes that CCM was responsible for $747 million in record sales in 2001—seven percent of overall sales in the American music industry that year.[56] More recently, Beaujon observes that in selling over 47.1 million records in 2003, CCM exceeded sales of all jazz, classical, and New Age albums combined, representing an increase in sales of 10 percent over five years.[57] The qualitative reasons for this late surge in sales and popularity—despite scandal in the CCM world—have been examined by, among others, John Stiles (in this very journal), who focuses on the genre’s enhanced marketing and public relations savvy.[58] Acknowledging such analyses, this paper, following Hegel, makes a more abstract teleological claim and suggests that such a boost in Christian rock’s visibility and “success”—its twenty-first century synthesis with popular culture—was not only a predictable, inevitable evolution of the genre’s collective self-consciousness, but necessary for CCM in both a theological and psychological context, despite the objections of more orthodox Christian naysayers.

[41] Put simply, the negation of culture is at the very least problematic, if not altogether impossible. A conundrum arises, in other words, if negation is grasped in isolation; for if the CCM subculture’s desire and goal is to challenge, and thus change, the Other it so rejects, its decision to disengage from the world renders its critique negligible in that the dialectic is left unfulfilled as negation alone results not in any actual change of any Other but merely its displacement. Expanding this notion beyond CCM, all negationist subcultures are irrelevant if they cling to negation and decline synthesis in that the sociopolitical consequence that results for the subcultures following their rejection of cultural hegemony is the same: inefficacy.[59]

[42] In purely aesthetic terms, both Christian and secular observers have noted that negation sans synthesis has been more detrimental to CCM than beneficial: several recent television shows (network and cable) have featured if not entire episodes devoted to roasting Christian rock, at least scenes where actors discuss the terrifically “uncool” nature of CCM.[60] This attitude did not come out of nowhere, of course; as Beaujon writes, Christian rock has an “arguably deserved reputation” for being contrived musically (often merely aping, at times poorly, the most popular secular rock acts), and lyrically banal.[61] This hostility toward CCM from secular critics and pop fans, explains music journalist and Christian Mark Joseph (who advocates for the genre’s engagement with culture), is a direct result of CCM’s isolation, its refusal to acknowledge the Other. Echoing Beaujon, Joseph feels that beyond inciting scorn from the parent culture by its self-segregation, CCM’s separation has resulted in an “inbred musical stagnation.”[62]

[43] Still, the strict negationist’s refusal of such mixing of the sacred and secular is not hard to understand; most purists see the assimilation of their religion and popular/secular culture as an adulteration that compromises the sacred and results in the “death” of their faith in its original, and likely most potent, form. (Recall, too, the suggestion by members of another negationist music genre—punk—that their subculture was “dead” the moment it became a media phenomenon and/or hit the pop charts in the late-1970s). [63] Indeed, it is a familiar criticism of the integrational brand of Christian rock that such radio-friendly Christian pop has, in the words of Howard and Streck, “merely adapted Christ to society rather than bringing society to Christ,” in so doing diluting the power of Christ’s message.[64] Accordingly, the very popularization of “their” music alarms the more ardent Christian rock partisans—artists and fans alike—not only because it signals the corruption of their art, but, simultaneously, their insular community’s demise.

[44] As we have already seen via Hegel, however, this death is necessary; negation alone is itself imperfect. Whether CCM, punk rock, or the “anti-Western” attitude of not only fundamentalist Islam but domestic, secular anarchist groups such as Anarchist Black Cross or the Earth Liberation Front, the bare negation of culture, robust though it may be, fails self-consciousness in that desire is not satisfied, the master is not changed or possessed, and the slave has attained no knowledge of the other or Self-Spirit. Here, one of Hegel’s favourite metaphors, the ascetic, is most appropriate: the negation of the body only brings self-consciousness to a theoretical cul-de-sac as the body cannot be denied genuinely and fully without death. But even in the case of suicide, self-consciousness has not possessed, known, or altered the other, has not reached “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness” as Hegel writes in the Phenomenology “Preface.”[65] The situation is similar for those who would refuse culture as a whole: until self-consciousness engages the other it has rejected, negation shall remain incomplete, even irrelevant.[66] French post-Structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard goes even further in his influential, if controversial, essay on the “hyperreality” of the postmodern society, of which CCM is unavoidably a part. Having professed the twentieth century death of the “Real” early in an essay entitled “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard (echoing Jesus’s “resist not evil” pronouncements in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) later suggests that, “One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negative.”[67] Put another way, the negation of a corrupt system only serves to verify it, to give it both colour and shape and perhaps even extend its life.

[45] By virtue of the dialectic’s very (self-critical) form, then, negation is a philosophically unsustainable position. As a result, the purist critique of Amy Grant et al. is, while not trivial, both shortsighted and abortive. Calling anticultural Christianity a “necessary and inadequate position,” Niebuhr too raises this point in theological terms for the separational Christian rocker and posits that self-segregated groups only think they are apart from the world when, in fact, they mirror it.[68] Thus the Christian anticultural position,

affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. [The Christian] cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him—though in different forms from those in which they appear in leaders of culture.[69]

Latin Church Father Tertullian is one of Niebuhr’s many examples of such paradox: Tertullian could not simply recant on his “Romanness” and criticize secular Roman culture when his theology, his synthesis of Roman and Christian “law,” was the result of it.

[46] But where Niebuhr concludes by advocating a certain “existential Christianity,” calling the individual Christian’s response to the “Christ or culture” debate a subjective determination,[70] this writer returns to Hegel as offering a more complete model whereby splinter communities might be understood and theorised. Specifically, what Hegel shows us that Niebuhr and his Christian existentialist antecedent Soren Kierkegaard (no friend of Hegel) cannot is that negation, despite its imperfection, is still useful, if not imperative. For through the dialectical, as opposed to existential (or even Baudrillardian), reading of negationist subculture, we can see that although the Christian rock community is unable to change the world or satisfy its collective desire as a self-negated group for reasons theoretical and practical, the individuals and bands that comprise this subculture can better work toward an altering of the substantive Other if they in turn negate their subculture and engage the secular world as synthesized or reaffirmed versions of that Other only more self-critical, self-conscious, knowledgeable, and even more successful in their ultimate teleological project of discovering Self-Spirit. And this cannot occur so long as the outsider community clings to a subjective and self-selected—Kierkegaardian—outsider position. Thus must negation occur a second time; and it is this second negation that actually authenticates and justifies and the first. Or, as Lithuanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it in a piece on Hegel, “The system has to die twice.”[71]

[47] Indeed, not only is synthesis necessary, but it is more crucial to self-consciousness’s fulfilling of its desire, altering the Other, and achieving Absolute Knowledge. “The paradox of the second negation is that it is more radical,” Zizek writes, because it represents “the moment of infinite pain, self-alienation; but, for that reason, [it is] closer to Reconciliation.”[72] Verily, synthesis represents the heretofore negationist’s self-sacrifice, her martyrdom, as it were. This is not to say that synthesis does not come without difficulty or consequence for the sacred, but compromise—which is indigenous to the dialectic—is both unavoidable and functional: in order for the Christian rock self-consciousness to advance, to avoid not only obsolescence and self-contradiction but a theological and intellectual rut (another version of “death”), it must, like Abraham is reported to have done with his son, offer up that which it holds most dear. For it is the refusal to compromise that is the believer’s true demise.

Notes

[1] The concert described took place in the unfinished basement of the Grand Forks, ND, Knights of Columbus club in February 2004.

[2] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), 2.

[3] Ibid., 110.

[4] Ibid., 111-119.

[5] See, for instance, Origen’s Against Celsus, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1965).

[6] “State of the Union” speech, 20 January 2004.

[7] H.R. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951), 7.

[8] Ibid., 83-115; Niebuhr further divides this final type into “synthesists,” “dualists,” and “conversionists.”

[9] The writer acknowledges that Niebuhr’s heuristic is historically insufficient and typologically limited; his placement of gnosticism in the “Christ of culture” category, poses problems as well. Unfortunately, a finer treatment of these problems is beyond this paper.

[10] Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 64.

[11] Ibid., 47-48.

[12] The majority of these groups have been Protestant groups such as the Amish, Mennonites, Quakers, and other Anabaptist denominations; and countless nondenominational evangelical Charismatics/Pentecostals.

[13] Mark Allan Powell, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2002), 9.

[14] The Prunes’ album, whose cover featured a variegated rosary set amid a purple background, follows the traditional Mass exactly—side one offering versions of “Kyrie Eleison,” “Gloria,” and “Credo”; side two “Sanctus,” “Benedictus,” and “Agnus Dei.” While the album was a commercial failure, “Kyrie Eleison” made it onto the soundtrack of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider.

[15] Norman’s biography can be found in Jay Howard and John Streck, Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Mark Joseph, The Rock & Roll Rebellion (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1999); and Mark Allan Powell, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music.

[16] Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1989), 21.

[17] See William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) and Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Despite their assertions, there is little evidence to suggest that America is more religious today than in the past or is in the midst of a “Great Awakening” equivalent to the eighteenth century awakening associated with Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Better analyses of the causes behind the “rise” of religious sentiment, especially of fundamentalism, have come from those studying globalization. For discussion on religion more frequently providing a source of identity in an increasingly homogenous and technological world, see, Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs, 72 (Summer 1993): 22-32; or Frank Lechner, “Global Fundamentalism,” in A Globalization Reader, ed. Frank Lechner and John Boli, 326-329 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

[18] Billy Graham even expressed a close affinity to the Jesus movement and a renewed hope for America’s religious future in a book published at the height of the Jesus movement: The Jesus Generation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971).

[19] Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., One Way: The Jesus Movement and its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 63-64.

[20] See, for instance, Greenbaum’s “Spirit In The Sky,” Diamond’s “I Thank The Lord For The Nighttime,” Elton John’s “Levon,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Jesus Is Just Alright” and several Vanilla Fudge and George Harrison songs from the late-1960s and/or early-1970s.

[21] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 14.

[22] Mark Powell’s somewhat awkward, self-referential definition of the genre calls CCM “music that appeals to self-identified fans of contemporary Christian music on account of a perceived connection to what they regard as Christianity” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, 13).

[23] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 49-74.

[24] Ibid., 75-110.

[25] Ibid., 111-148.

[26] Ibid., 49.

[27] Petra, “Not of This World,” Not of This World (Word Records, 1983). Entrepreneurial Christians have prolonged the life of this particular Petra album, more than twenty years after its release, by selling t-shirts online and at Christian rock festivals such as Cornerstone that read “NOTW: Not Of This World.” For more on Christian rock concert commerce, see Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), and Andrew Beaujon, Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 2006).

[28] Hartman quoted in Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 65-66.

[29] San Diego’s Switchfoot, a recent cross-over act to find secular success, virtually echoes Petra in “The Beautiful Letdown” from its album of the same title (Sony/Sparrow, 2003) when lead singer Jonathan Foreman sings: “In a world full of bitter pain and bitter doubt / I was trying so hard to fit in, fit in / Until I found out / I don’t belong here.”

[30] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 69. See also Mark Powell, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, 695.

[31] See, among many others, the lyrics and performances of CCM artists Stryper (Soldiers Under Command, Enigma, 1985), Matthew Ward (Armed and Dangerous, Live Oak, 1987), and Saint (Warriors of the Son, Quicksilver, 1984).

[32] It should be noted that the use of Caucasian figures in the band’s album art follows logically from the fact that CCM is largely a “white” genre: like most rock sub-genres, the vast majority of CCM bands and fans are Caucasian, not to mention male.

[33] It is important to note that Word Records, founded in 1951, is a subsidiary of Warner Music Group, a major (secular) collection of labels.

[34] Powell, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, 698.

[35] Ibid., 695.

[36] Ibid., 796.

[37] Ibid., 696.

[38] Many bills related to school prayer have been introduced in the United States Congress in recent decades. Those Petra was likely supporting included Illinois Representative Philip Crane’s H.R. 103 bill introduced in 1987 and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms’s S.47 bill first introduced in 1985. For more information on these and related bills, see Congress online: http://www.senate.gov or http://www.house.gov (accessed 15 February 2007).

[39] Jesus People USA, “Meet Our Family,” JPUSA, http://www.jpusa.org/meet.html (accessed 10 July 2006).

[40] See Acts 2:44-47 and 4:32-35.

[41] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 51.

[42] Though JPUSA denies the charges, scholar and evangelical Christian Ronald Enroth (Recovering from Churches that Abuse, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994) accuses the group of a certain authoritarianism internally and with ostracizing members who express an interest in leaving the commune to rejoin the secular world.

[43] Resurrection Band, “Band Bio’s” [sic], Grrr Records, http://www.resurrectionband.com (accessed 10 July 2006).

[44] According to Powell (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Music, 755), the Band’s opening act for this particular series of shows was CCM artist Steven Taylor, who repeatedly went on record, literally, deriding “Christians” he considered too lax in their faith (ibid., 929).

[45] Resurrection Band, “Military Man,” Live Bootleg (Sparrow Records, 1983).

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid. See the songs “Playground” and “Gameroom.”

[48] Ibid., “Wendi’s Rap.”

[49] Ibid., “Glenn’s Rap.”

[50] Another of Hegel’s difficulties is that his system fails to allow for nuance in the form (and perhaps, as a result, content) negation takes, and if different types of negation are equitable. For example, if a negationist were invited to a formal dance (or a CCM artist to a secular event), how does one “negate” the event or invitation if she were so inclined? Does the invitee arrive at the dance naked, or in a parka and combat boots to parody the event’s formality? Does she simply not attend? And are the consequences of these various responses different or one more noteworthy? Of course. Unfortunately, Hegel leaves little room for such “shades” of refusal.

[51] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 126-138.

[52] See Mark Joseph, The Rock & Roll Rebellion, and Andrew Beaujon, Body Piercing Saved My Life.

[53] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 77.

[54] Ibid., 103.

[55] Several Christian acts, including Amy Grant, Switchfoot, P.O.D., and Creed, have placed in the top-50 of the Billboard “Hot 100” singles chart in recent years; the “Hot 100” chart tracks requests for all pop songs irrespective of genre. See Billboard magazine or Billboard online: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/index.jsp (accessed 15 March 2007). For more on the twenty-first century success of cross-over Christian artists, see Mark Joseph, Faith, God, & Rock ‘N’ Roll (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 2003).

[56] Lorraine Ali, “The Glorious Rise of Christian Pop,” Newsweek, 16 July 2001: 38-48.

[57] Beaujon, Body Piercing Saved My Life, 9.

[58] John Stiles, “Contemporary Christian Music: Public Relations Amid Scandal,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 11 (Fall 2005), http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art11-christianmusic.html (accessed 6 January 2007). See also Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock.

[59] As certainly not all “negationist” subcultures can be read theologically, the reader will note that I am here moving beyond a strict phenomenological reading of negation. It should be noted, however, that most American anticultural groups tend to be religious in nature; and even negationist subcultures that are not explicitly Spirit-seeking—punk rock for example—serve as a sort of secular religion or community support group (replete with rituals, symbolism, and perhaps mythology) for their members.

[60] Such shows include, to name only a few, The Simpsons, South Park, Seinfeld, and Six Feet Under.

[61] Beaujon, Body Piercing Saved My Life, 6.

[62] Joseph, The Rock & Roll Rebellion, 261.

[63] See Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), for early punks’ lament that their subculture “died” as a result of its integration with popular culture.

[64] Howard and Streck, Apostles of Rock, 94.

[65] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 14.

[66] Hegel would suggest that this, too, is the situation for popular culture, which could be read as the negation of Christian culture, but such a reading is beyond the scope of this essay.

[67] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 25-26. It is interesting to note that Baudrillard prefaces his essay on the death of the “real” in lieu of a mediated “hyperreality” with a quotation supposedly from Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” These lines do not actually appear anywhere in either the Tanakh or Christian Bible.

[68] Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 65.

[69] Ibid., 69.

[70] Ibid., 241-249.

[71] Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 2000), 72.

[72] Ibid., 80.